report on the events of 1641 without mentioning this province.  If one considers the indifference of the friars toward such events in Nature, it is not improbable that the eruptions of 1641 when a mountain fell in in Northern Luzon and a lake took its place, has been transferred on the Iriga.  To illustrate the indifference it may be mentioned that even the padres living at the foot of the Albay could not agree upon the dates of its very last eruptions.

[Another attempt at mountain climbing.] When I was at Tambong, a small hamlet on the shore of the lake belonging to the parochial district of Buhi, I made a second unsuccessful attempt to reach the highest point of the Iriga.  We arrived in the evening at the southern point of the crater’s edge (1,041 meters above the level of the sea by my barometrical observation), where a deep defile prevented our further progress.  Here the Igorots abandoned me, and the low-landers refused to bivouac in order to pursue the journey on the following day; so I was obliged to return.  Late in the evening, after passing through a coco plantation, we reached the foot of the mountain and found shelter from a tempest with a kind old woman; to whom my servants lied so shamelessly that, when the rain had abated, we were, in spite of our failure, conducted with torches to Tambong, where we found the palm-grove round the little hamlet magically illuminated with bright bonfires of dry coconut-leaves in honor of the Conquistadores del Iriga; and where I was obliged to remain for the night, as the people were too timorous or too lazy to cross the rough water of the lake.

[Pineapple fiber preparations.] Here I saw them preparing the fiber of the pine-apple for weaving.  The fruit of the plants selected for this purpose is generally removed early; a process which causes the leaves to increase considerably both in length and in breadth.  A woman places a board on the ground, and upon it a pine-apple-leaf with the hollow side upwards.  Sitting at one end of the board, she holds the leaf firmly with her toes, and scrapes its outer surface with a potsherd; not with the sharp fractured edge but with the blunt side of the rim; and thus the leaf is reduced to rags.  In this manner a stratum of coarse longitudinal fiber is disclosed, and the operator, placing her thumb-nail beneath it, lifts it up, and draws it away in a compact strip; after which she scrapes again until a second fine layer of fiber is laid bare.  Then, turning the leaf round, she scrapes its back, which now lies upwards, down to the layer of fiber, which she seizes with her hand and draws at once, to its full length, away from the back of the leaf.  When the fiber has been washed, it is dried in the sun.  It is afterwards combed, with a suitable comb, like women’s hair, sorted into four classes, tied together, and treated like the fiber of the lupi.  In this crude manner are obtained the threads for the celebrated web nipis de [Pina.] Pina, which is considered by experts the finest in the world.  Two shirts of this kind are in the Berlin Ethnographical Museum (Nos. 291 and 292).  Better woven samples are in the Gewerbe Museum of Trade and Commerce.  In the Philippines, where the fineness of the work is best understood and appreciated, richly-embroidered costumes of this description have fetched more than $1,400 each. [102]